Often played by children and teenagers, the protagonists on view in On Struggling to Remain Present When You Want to Disappear take active part in physical or symbolic conflicts as they create alternative personalities, forge online relationships, or navigate across constructed environments. Through immersive video and sound installations as well as photographs, the exhibition examines the boundaries where the tangible, the imagined, and the virtual become permeable, and the porousness of these frontiers allows players to break out of traditional societal norms to explore new ways of dealing with their own realities.

Culminating the curatorial fellowship of Wang Dan at KADIST San Francisco, the exhibition is a collaboration between OCAT (Shanghai), the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), and KADIST.

*On Struggling To Remain Present When You Want To Disappear draws from the title of an essay On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear, by Nana Adusei-Poku, published in e-flux journal #80 – March 2017